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FocusProfiliDa I Simpson a Over Easy: intervista a Mimi Pond

Da I Simpson a Over Easy: intervista a Mimi Pond

Mimi Pond wears a lot of hats. She’s an underground artist, a best-seller author, a screenwriter and, of course, a cartoonist. Over Easy, her latest work, is also the most important to date. This bildungsroman about her youth and her time at the Imperial Café, a place of artists and waiters, was critically acclaimed and put her on the map again.

We talked with her about the genesis of the book and her love for the comic book medium.

mimipond

So, let’s start from the beginning. When – and how – did you discover comic books?

I don’t remember ever not reading comics. My dad would read the Sunday newspaper comics to me before I could read. I remember reading the Signet paperback editions of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Magazine when I was six years old. We always had Mad magazine in the house. We also had collections of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, New Yorker magazine cartoon collections, Virgil Partch books, and more.

What about superheroes?

I never read superhero comic books. There was nothing in them for me. There were no girls, no women with any power. Lois Lane was constantly getting into trouble and then Superman had to save her. She was stupid! Wonder Woman bored me. I never really liked fantasy situations or science fiction. Back then there were no strong female characters. Two big inspirations for me are non-comic books- every book by children’s book author Beverly Cleary, such as “Beezus and Ramona,” with illustrations by Louis Darling, and “Harriet the Spy” written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh. Both had fully realized girl characters – girl who noticed things about the world – like me! That was what I could relate to- and wonderful illustrations. I also loved the books written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey, such as “Homer Price.” It really made me sad to think that only kids got books with illustrations in them. It seemed to me that adults were being punished by having books without pictures!

I loved “Little Lulu” and “Richie Rich” comics. I adored “Archie.”  It was a great disappointment to me to discover that my high school experience was going to be nothing like Riverdale High School. For years before I went to high school, we would drive past what I knew was going to be my high school, and I was always looking for the malt shop, which should have been on the corner across the street. Where was it? Also in my early teens I was introduced to underground comics and those were a real revelation. Anything Robert Crumb did was amazing, if only for the drawing alone. His wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Diane Noomin, and many other women cartoonists became inspirations for me as well. There was also a shocking amount of misogyny and violence against women in those comic books. No one questioned it at that time- it was just a given. In high school I saw the National Lampoon and all the comics within its pages were very inspiring, particularly those of Shary Flenniken (who bought my work for the magazine and became my mentor)  and Mary K. Brown. My father had wanted to become a cartoonist but his father would not let him go to art school. He joined the Navy, which took him to San Diego, California, where he met and married my mother. He worked for General Dynamics Convair (a defense and aerospace contractor)  for about 37 years but always did art on the side. He was my first cartooning teacher. He also took me to one of the very first San DIego Comic-Cons, in about 1970, at the University of California at San Diego. I met Ray Bradbury, who was one of the few science fiction authors I really loved. It was thrilling. I went to subsequent Comic-Cons and met people like Bob Clampitt,  Ray Harryhausen, June Foray, and Jack Kirby. I have a lot of respect for comic book artists even if the subject matter is not my cup of tea. The great thing about the early San Diego Comic-Con was that this motley group of teenage nerds invited these overlooked giants of popular culture to come and tell them their stories. The rest of the world was just ignoring them. It was a really important step in the history of popular culture.

Over Easy is a memoir that took you many years to wrote and had a very troubled genesis, but you just didn’t want to make it as a graphic novel, until Spiegelman said so. Would you tell us the story of how OE was born?

I knew from the first day I went to work at Mama’s Royal Cafe in Oakland, California in 1978 that the whole thing was a story that I one day would have to tell. It’s like it just lodged itself in my gut and stayed there. I had long discussions with the real-life version of Lazlo Meringue, my boss and friend John Veglia, about how we would go about framing this story. Everyone who worked there knew it was a movie. Everyone there adored him. He was our groovy beatnik dad. We idolized him. The characters and episodes of the restaurant were all so rich, but there was so much material it was unwieldy. We kicked ideas around but nothing came of it. Sadly, he died in 1988, but it still was rolling around in my mind like a loose marble. Finally when my son was born in 1992, I remember being so happy to have this beautiful child and I thought, “why would you want to do anything else but be with your children?” Then it occurred to me that our groovy beatnik dad at the restaurant, my boss, had 3 kids, and that he was always out partying with a bunch of irresponsible 20-somethings. And then I knew that he was much more complex and flawed than I’d realized. That’s when I knew I had this dichotomy   to work with. Dark and light. Good and evil. Much more interesting.

You cited Dave Eggers’ “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and “the Buddha of Suburbia” by Hanef Kureishi (even if I can see some similarities with “The Black Album”, also by Kureishi). In what ways they influenced you?

I liked the first-person narrative and the attitude of both. Kureishi is addressing the same decade. It’s an often-overlooked decade and I don’t think very many people have really tackled the complexities of the 1970s.

In OE you really manipulate time in a plastic way. The first day of work takes 53 pages, then you’re skipping forward. Was this “time” aspect present since the beginning or did you improvise along the way? Were there any episodes that you had to remove in order to make the story fluent and manageable?

There was absolutely no improvisation. I initially wrote it as a conventional piece of fiction, which took about 3 years, on and off (my kids were in grade school at the time). I did a lot of outlines and revisions and more revisions until it was just what I wanted to say. My agent couldn’t sell it. I finally had to break down and admit to myself that it wanted to be a graphic novel- I am a cartoonist, after all, and it’s what I do best. I had a conversation with Art Spiegelman, and I guess he heard the passion I had for the story. He said, “You should just do it.” So I simply followed the manuscript and tried to instead draw the world I’d spent so long crafting sentences to describe. I know exactly how it’s supposed to look, so it’s just like a road map. There were episodes that got tossed out before I even began the original manuscript. There are dozens of characters left by the side of the road. Twelve fry cooks became three. Dozens of waitresses became four or five. Compression and compositing- otherwise it’d just be an unwieldy documentary! But once the original manuscript was finished, I have stuck to it faithfully.

Over Easy is a semi-autobiographical book. Using one’s personal life in fictionalized works is a common thing. Do you think that the reader has to know the author’s biography to fully understand the piece. I’m gonna put an example on the table. Eisner’s Contract with God was born out of the tragic loss of Eisner’s daughter. If I know that, will I enjoy or understand better the graphic novel than not knowing it? Is the author’s life part of the experience? Do I need and introduction, a contextualization? On an opposite side, do you think that an artistic product – or a product that has the purpose of entertain – lives in a void and can be enjoyed alone or you must know the artistic context in which that work lives in?

Gee, if you need the context of the author’s real life, then pretty much the author’s only audience is going to be a small circle of friends he or she can give the book to. Of course these things have to be more universal! Understanding the context can make it more interesting for some people. On the other hand, many brilliant artists are horrible monsters. The more we know about them, the more it ruins their work for us! I love reading biographies and memoirs, but it’s always shocking to find out things like that Edith Wharton was a raging anti-semite, that Patricia Highsmith was horribly cruel to her friends and lovers, and that Keith Richards has not taken one iota of responsibility for having tormented his family with his drug addiction. Sometimes you don’t want to know!

The book has a slightly “Wolf of Wall Waitress Street” attitude. In the sense that drugs and sex are not taboo and people are not overthinking or second guessing about it, they just enjoyed (the restaurant employees frequently burst through the kitchen doors in excitement or a rush of cocaine-fueled energy). Also the way Laszo recruits his employees – they have to tell a joke or a dream – seems based on a more creative mood rather than a standard business model. So, was this the 70s for you?

In the 70s, there was no “Just say no.” No one was saying “NO.” Everyone was saying “YES!!!” To everything. No one was there to say that there were any consequences whatsoever to this behavior. We were in the midst of the sexual revolution, and it was not only your right but your DUTY to go out and shag as much as you could. There was no reason at the time not to, as long as you had birth control. With drugs, it was only a matter of common sense, and then, that was sadly lacking. I thought it was pretty easy to see how it was going to all end up,  but I was one of the few who did, apparently. And what’s that term? BUSINESS MODEL? Nobody had a BUSINESS MODEL. Everyone had a FUN MODEL.

Within OE, your writing is all over the place (see below), you really use the page to a point where the writing is the drawing. I think that’s a natural reaction because comic book is an hybrid medium. How do you reconcile the words with the pictures? According to you, which one of the two prevails?

There were a few passages where I felt like what I had written was the best way to get across certain points- in particular, my rant about the 1970s- it would have taken pages and pages to have illustrated everything I hated about the 70s, and I wanted the story to move along -because really where we long to be is back in that restaurant!

overeasy3

Over Easy is colored with a light-to-dark green wash. It’s like a sepia tone on acid, not nostalgic at all, because it’s a cold color. Why did you chose to do the entire book with that color? Could you talk about the process of drawing OE (which I read was a bit tricky)?

I really can’t say that my choice of that color was in the slightest bit intellectual. It was just a gut choice. I’d been very inspired by Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” It was the first graphic novel I’d seen that made me think that I could also do this. The interior of the real restaurant, Mama’s Royal Cafe, in Oakland (which is still open and still wonderful) is a combination of red, green, black, ivory and wooden counters and booths. That viridian green is the closest to evoking that palette for me. It just felt right.

My publisher, Drawn and Quarterly, asked me to separate the line work from the tones in order to make the printing crisper. This was and is problematic. I don’t work on a computer at all. I draw the pages on bristol board in pen and ink. Then I have to put them on a light box and put a piece of 90-lb watercolor paper on top of that, and in the dark, do the watercolor tones, which is really just guesswork. It’s all very maddening. Then I send it all off to them, they scan it and assemble it in photoshop and send me a pdf. Only then do I really know how it looks.

If I google your name one of the first things that come up is The Simpsons. I know the subject is not your cup of tea, but it’s obviously the thing the general audience know you for. How did you get the gig?

My husband, the artist Wayne White, worked on the 80s kids’ show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” with the very talented Gary Panter, another great cartoonist. Gary introduced us to the cartoonist Matt Groening, who at the time was living in (literally) a shack in Venice, Ca. Eventually Matt, who came to our wedding and videotaped it for us, got the chance to do “the Simpsons.” Apparently he was asking all his cartoonist friends if they wanted to write for the show, and apparently I was the only one who said yes.

What were your ideas for the show (or just the episode)? How much did you script change from the first draft to the actual episode?

I haven’t looked at my original script in many years, but I really don’t think it changed that much. TV screenwriting is by its nature a very collaborative process, so of course jokes were added. This happens in every writers’ room.

You have spoken about a “boys’ club” mentality. Could you elaborate on that? Were the writers treating you differently from how they were interacting with each others?

There is still a boy’s club mentality in Hollywood that is extremely pervasive. Of course they treat you differently. You’re a threat to them because you have a vagina. Nothing has changed. Women are still on the outside looking in, even when they have staff positions on tv shows. Women are still in the minority in just about any power position in Hollywood. It’s a vile business- and not just because of the sexism.

I watched Beauty Is Embarrassing, a very charming documentary about Wayne White, who happens to be married to you. At one point, the film chronicles the struggle of having a family. You had to put aside your career. Did your husband and kids read Over Easy? If so, do your children look at you in a different way now?

I never really “put aside” my career. I was trying to work when I could. It wasn’t just like I dropped everything, threw out all my art supplies, to be the happy homemaker. My husband was always working very very hard to support us, often taking jobs he couldn’t stand so that we could pay our bills. Someone had to take care of the kids and the house. I wasn’t making any money at the time so of course I did what I could to keep up my end of the bargain. That’s the way it works with a family. I did do some screenwriting besides The Simpsons. I worked on the tv show “Designing Women.” I worked writing an animated film for Disney that never got made. I spent years while the kids were in grade school writing “Over Easy.” I also did comics off and on for the Los Angeles Times for years. It was frustrating to only be able to work in fits and starts.  I think once I really started drawing “Over Easy,” the kids began to see me in a different way. For one thing, I was happier. And everyone knows- as we say in the Southern US, “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” This is really true.

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Mimi with her husband Wayne White

In this last year you were all over the place, doing interviews with national papers, radios, got awards and so on. Over Easy was at New York Times Best-Seller. I think it’s something you’re not used to, since you have been away from the press for quite a while. How do manage all of this? Regarding the critics, do you read reviews? Are thy meaningful to you or it is just something you do not want to be engaged in?

I am very much enjoying the success of “Over Easy.” I’m not Justin Bieber! It’s pretty manageable. The paparazzi always are kind enough to shoot me from my good side. (KIDDING!) I read reviews. Most of them have been great. A couple of them were really off the wall, but what can you do?

You’re working on the sequel. Will it take another 35 years?

Over Easy has a publication date of Spring 2016. So, no.

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